Chevalier de Bayard

Chevalier de Bayard is a private label wine from the German direct selling group Ferdinand Pieroth. The wine is a Vins de Pays de l’Hérault from the Languedoc-Rousillon region in France. It’s an inexpensive red blend that is one of the more popular brands from Pieroth, some older vintages in high demand and sold at auction.

So (and with apologies to the OP) making this the thread about hillside herbal and spice notes in wines of CA or France (or Spain or wherever) I'll ask some more specific questions here:What CA wines have demonstrated these notes of hillside 'garrigue', sagebrush, whatever for you? GregT has mentioned elsewhere to me about Qupe Central Coast syr...
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Unless you're an utter Revolutionary War geek, or want to get down and dirty and maybe survive a visit with the utterly wrong crowd, I think I already did. Two visits to Camden running into the wrong sorts years back and I knew that sage and manzanita and shale hillsides behind and head-high or higher gnarly breaks in front--with a proper burrit...
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Nope. Nice historic info - CRAV is still around and from time to time you hear the same chants. They protested when Mondavi was coming in although Mondavi would have done much for the region and eventually Gallo moved in anyway. And most of the wine gets sold to one of the biggest negotiants in France anyway, perhaps with a bit of Algerian wine ...
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Don't know how much you can get back up into the hills of inland San Diego county, Greg, but I grew up very frequently traipsing across the backcountry mountains of Ventura, Santa Barbara and LA Counties, occasionally even up into San Luis Obispo and Monterey counties, too. You come home with your clothes all smelling of sage and many, many othe...
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If that's true about the Libyans it's a fantastic story. Should be a movie.And you're right about some producers. The best Carignan I've ever had was from there. Really good wine. It would have had to sell for $100 retail and I asked the wine maker what he was thinking and how he thought he'd sell it.He shrugged.Pretty much summed up the problem.
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To me from the moment I first drank some of that wine back in the '70s, Languedoc has been about stoniness and herbs (limestone and garrigue) in the air and on the palate. That fantastically, gently piercing light, and Mediterranean 'soul', for lack of a better term. Some great red juice with that spice and minerality, then that fresh acidic whi...
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One more major problem with Languedoc wines is that the larger, shadier negociants there have been doing a lot of profit-taking for years by importing crap wine from North Africa and blending it with more-expensive-yet-still-cheap-and-mediocre local wine, stirring and shaking and bottling the swill as 'Languedoc' wine (when it isn't in fact or s...
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